


It Shouldn't Work (But It Does)

by venator



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff, I Don't Even Know, Jean is Sad, Lil bit of Springles and Yukimuri, M/M, Marco Makes it Better?, Marco Sings in an Acapella Group, One Shot, Singing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-25
Updated: 2014-07-25
Packaged: 2018-02-10 09:17:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2019570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venator/pseuds/venator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean Kirstein is bored of his life and Marco sings at bus stops. Meeting each other is good for them both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Shouldn't Work (But It Does)

**Author's Note:**

> I had a dream that Marco was in an acapella group and that was all I could think about for the rest of the day. I really don't know what this is, but give it a go because I think it's kinda cute. Pls love acapella Marco as much as I do.

The first time Jean sees him is at a bus stop. It’s surprising because his usual routine is made up of the same alarm from his phone, the same brisk walk from his place, the same dark clouds falling away from each other like rose petals reminding him that his life is bleak and boring and he works in a coffee shop. But as he stands close to the bus stop sign, so hopefully the driver will stop without Jean having to hail him, he notices someone standing underneath the bus shelter. _Unusual._

At first he doesn’t really care; he continues staring out at the cars that drive past and hoping that the titan-sized raindrops that threaten to fall from the sky – won’t. It’s when the first drop hits his cheek that he realizes the person under the bus shelter is singing. He glances over wearily. After he takes in the boy with the velvet brown hair that hangs like feathers over his eyes, he realizes he’s turned his whole body around just to stare at him. The boy has dark skin, dappled with freckles, as though summer never left. He nods his head in time with the beat of the song he sings and if Jean hears correctly, it sounds like a more upbeat version of The Beatles’ Come Together, a remix of sorts.

When the boys eyes slide shut – fingers tapping out a rhythm on his skinny jeans – Jean takes the moment to admire his serene face. Clearly, he doesn’t know he’s being watched. Jean hopes he won’t notice at all, so he can continue appreciating his thick eyelashes and pink lips as they mumble the words. 

The moment doesn’t last long, however. Closed eyes suddenly open dramatically and Jean barely manages to discern the colour of those eyes before they widen in embarrassment, cheeks flushing pink and a hand rushing to pull out the headphones. Jean wastes no time in turning around and pretending he hadn’t just been caught. 

A few seconds later, he hears someone shuffling towards him. There’s no mistaking who it is, so he squares his shoulders and looks as stoic as he can. 

“Uh,” the boy clears his throat and says nothing else for the passing minute. “I – I don’t actually know what to say,” he begins again, nervous laughter falling from his pretty pink lips. “I’ve never actually done that before, so I’m not sure if I should apologize, or something.” 

“You have a nice voice,” Jean tells him. It’s true. Technically, the boy has a nice _everything_ , but Jean’s not going to bare his soul for anyone. Not even freckled boys with great singing voices. 

More of the boy’s nervous laughter fills the cold air around them and, for some strange reason, Jean suddenly feels warm. “Thanks,” he says and Jean can literally _hear_ the smile in his voice. This stranger is too full of happiness for Jean to handle on a morning as grim as this one. “I’m glad you like The Beatles,” the boy continues.

“It’s not the original, is it?” He’s only asking to be polite, he tells himself, not because he likes the boy’s voice.

“No, it’s not.” The answer is given in a tone of surprise. “It’s a mash-up with, um, Kesha, actually.” 

This time, Jean actually turns to look at the boy with a brow raised. “Kesha?” he asks in what he hopes is a dubious manner, but he’s not quite sure because _shit, shit, shit, he’s gorgeous._ With a hand coming up to scratch at the back of his neck, the boy laughs nervously again. God, he’s even got perfect teeth. 

“Sometimes two things that you wouldn’t think work together, actually do in the end, and it turns out to be something pretty amazing,” the boy tells him, but Jean doesn’t hear most of it because he’s too busy imagining what it would be like to run his tongue over this gorgeous stranger’s teeth. When Jean doesn’t respond, the boy blushes harder. “I’m Marco, by the way,” he continues and Jean is glad that Marco doesn’t offer his hand to shake. He isn’t sure he would have been able to shake it anyway, too mortified by his own social awkwardness. 

“Jean,” he replies as the bus rounds the corner. It’s pulled to a stop in front of them before Jean actually has to think of something else conversational-worthy to say. He steps through the open bus doors muttering, “See you, Marco.”

Later, while he’s working and making coffee, he’ll notice that the rich colour of the liquid he pours into those damn paper cups makes him think of something other than hopelessness. 

Sasha will playfully whip him with a tea towel and ask if he met someone. Eren will laugh as he waits for his coffee, saying that Jean couldn’t attract anyone with a scowl like that, before leaving with Armin, who apologizes. Connie will pat him on the back and tell him they’re going out tonight, _so don’t worry you can let off some steam then._

The day will go on and Jean will think of freckles and nervous laughter. 

\--

The evening finds everyone who works at Maria Coffee Shop at the local club in town. The _thumpa-thump_ of music can be heard from all corners of the city at this time of night. Jean sits surrounded by smoke, loud friends and an electric atmosphere. Connie and Sasha are people watching, presenting their findings to Historia, who leans into Ymir as she laughs at their discussion. When it comes to partying, the group isn’t the most exciting – not when compared to Jaeger and his friends, whom he’d noticed earlier on the dance floor – but, Jean finds he doesn’t mind. 

He only truly enters their conversation when he hears Sasha squeal, “Oh, look at freckles over there!” Then he becomes alert. Sitting up, his amber eyes scan the mass of bodies moving in time to the loud bass before landing on a single familiar face. 

“Holy shit,” he mutters. Feathery hair and a gorgeous smile? “He’s here.” 

“Who’s here?” Sasha leans over the table, attempting to look in the direction Jean’s eyes are glued to. “Freckles?”

“Is that who you met this morning?” Historia asks, while Ymir elbows Jean and wolf whistles. 

“Guys, guys, guys, chill out,” Connie says as he pulls Sasha back into her seat. “Here,” he says to Jean, pulling out a note from his pocket and sliding it over the table, “Go get a drink – on me – and by the time you get back, they’ll have forgotten.” Jean rolls his eyes, grunts his appreciation and slides out from the table to head to the bar.

As it happens, halfway there he gets an idea. Taking a sharp turn towards the DJ, Jean hands over the note and requests a song before heading back to the table. Instead of sitting back down, he leans against the table and searches for Marco again. He finds him laughing with someone who looks incredibly like Eren Jaeger, bites his lip and hopes his plan wasn’t as stupid as he just decided it was. 

The current song ends and the familiar beginning of Kesha’s Tik Tok blasts through the speakers. Connie groans and Ymir makes a face like she’s just taken fourteen shots of the strongest stuff they have at the bar.

“What the fu –”

“Shut up, Connie, I chose this song,” Jean admits, watching his best friend’s face morph into a look of horror. 

“Jean! Why would – how could you do something like that? To _me_?” Connie whines, burrowing his head in his arms on the table. Sasha snakes a hand around his shoulders and laughs. 

“It’s his favourite,” Jean mutters, staring at Marco with a frown. He hasn’t noticed the song yet. Then again, he probably still thinks its just Kesha. _C’mon, c’mon, c’mon._ Suddenly, Come Together by The Beatles is playing, although much faster than the original, and it moulds perfectly with Tik Tok as its base. Next to him Connie’s head springs up with a loud _holy shit this is new,_ but Jean’s still staring at Marco who has realized what is playing over the speakers. 

Jean can’t hear him from this far, but he’s pretty sure Marco yells _oh my god_ , before dragging the someone who looks like Jaeger towards the dance floor. Inside, Jean is ecstatic. His plan worked and Marco was on the dance floor and now Jean could go dance with him – the only problem is that Marco can actually _dance._

“Damn, boys got moves!” Sasha yells out, jumping up from her seat to latch onto Jean’s shoulders, “You had better get in there son, before someone else makes a move.” Jean merely swallows audibly. “Seriously, it was a good plan, but it’s gonna work way too well for someone else if you don’t hurry up and get on the floor!”

“Nah, it’s okay, I’m just gonna –” As he turns to take his seat again, Sasha gets up and grabs his shoulders.

“Jean,” she says sternly, looking him in the eyes, “Are you a man? Or a barista?”

“Is that _supposed_ to make me feel better, Sash?”

He then turns around when he feels a light tap on his arm and is met with Historia’s reassuring face. Her fingers curl around his arm and she smiles. “Go in there, Jean. You don’t have to dance _well_ – you already have the advantage that you’ve talked to him before, right? Just make sure he sees you.” 

With a great sigh, Jean turns away from his friends and heads towards the dance floor. He hears _Go, Kirstein!_ being called after him and he wishes desperately that Historia wasn’t so convincing. 

He’s all shaky knees and sweaty palms until he gets into the heat of things. Surrounded by the warm bodies of strangers, all moving the same beat, all here for the same reason, he supposes – it’s not so bad. He pauses when he finds Marco, because the way he moves is mesmerising. The music is in his very bones, Jean thinks. There’s a smile on his face and his eyes close for a moment as he rolls his body with each gradual boom of the bass, arms in the air and fingers stretching high. When he opens his eyes again, they land on Jean. His breath catches as Marco’s smile widens, hands moving down and stretching out to point right at him. Jean takes a step forward.

 _I know you, you know me_ – Marco mouths along to the song, hands gesturing for Jean to come closer. There’s nothing for Jean to do except obey, placing each foot in front of the other till he’s standing right in front of Marco, motionless in the mass of moving bodies. Marco laughs, then reaches out to grip at Jean’s hands and pull them up. 

“Move your feet!” he yells at Jean through the noise, before throwing his head back with a grin as he continues to dance. In the back of his mind, Jean can hear Historia and Sasha telling him to go for it. So he does, and fuck if he doesn’t feel good. 

At some point Marco slides his arms around Jean’s neck with a sheepish grin, but Jean just goes with it. He relishes the feel of Marco’s body moving against his own, the sound of his laughter ringing in his ears and it’s good; it’s so _fucking_ good. 

If you’d ask him later, he’d deny it, but he lost himself in the midst of all those people. It had been too long since he’d felt good about anything, too busy being angry at the world, determined to show everyone that he’d been fucked over and look what it had done to him. For a moment, dancing with Marco, he’d forgotten his apathetic demeanor and he’d threaded his fingers through the dark, feather-soft hair and he’d whispered in Marco’s ear _do you wanna get out of here?_

And, _oh_ , the way Marco kissed him; the way he ran the tips of his fingers over the pale skin that only served to show Jean was still human; the way he grinned against Jean’s neck, whispering his name over and over; the way his eyelids fluttered shut, hands gripping at Jean’s hips – it made Jean feel alive again. 

They fall asleep, fingers threaded together. 

When Jean wakes the next morning the first thing he realizes is that he feels different. Actually, the first thing he realizes is that he’s cold on his back from where his blanket isn’t covering him, but he finds that he doesn’t care because he feels _happy._

There is a note lying neatly on the unoccupied pillow with his name on it.

Languidly, he leans over to take the note between his fingers and reads:

_**Sorry, I had to go.** _

_**Thanks for last night.** _

_**I’d like to see you again.** _

_**Marco.** _

There’s a number written on the other side. His heart swells – and so does another part of him when he fleetingly remembers Marco’s face the previous evening, lips parted, eyes shut, Jean’s name on his lips – and if he smiles briefly to himself, well, no one has to know but him.

\--

Jean has to open Maria Coffee Shop that same day, so he can’t afford to laze around in bed all morning. Historia, bless her, is waiting outside the shop even though she doesn’t actually have a shift in the morning.

“I know how much you hate opening the shop,” she tells him, smiling graciously, “Also, I want to know all the details before Sasha comes along and you close up like a clam!”

So they work side by side, Historia unstacking chairs and Jean grinding coffee beans, as he tells her how he danced till he couldn’t stand, then he pulled Marco to his home and _I really don’t want to go on in detail from here, Historia._ She laughs and touches his cheek gently.

“I know you’ve had a hard time, Jean,” she says smiling sadly, “But, you did good with this one.”

They continue to work in silence until Sasha and Connie arrive, hand in hand, then the coffee shop fills with noise. People drift in slowly. There’s a rush around lunchtime and then it quietens down again sometime after four. Ymir wanders in towards the evening, asking about the girlfriend she managed to loose this morning. Historia greets her from behind the counter and Ymir just shakes her head, seats herself on the counter as the rest of them clean up and serve the few stragglers. 

“So, Bert and Reiner are doing this thing for their college this evening –”

“A show,” Historia interrupts her girlfriend and earns an eye roll. 

“A show, whatever. Some sort of promotional thing for their arts college and they’re performing with their a cappella group and they asked me and Historia to come along and watch, but I kinda don’t wanna go –”

“What Ymir is trying to ask is if you guys want to come along tonight?” Historia finishes as she pulls off her apron, hanging it in the broom closet and pulling Ymir off the counter and into a hug. The two leave after Sasha and Connie’s delighted replies of _hell yeah, we’re down._ Jean has no choice but to tag along.

He later finds himself seated in a large auditorium – complete with wooden floors and those red curtains with golden tassels and shit – squished between Sasha and Historia, who’s girlfriend is seated next to some guy named Levi who scowls just as much as Jean does, if not more. 

The coordinator of the night welcomes them and introduces their first act – which Historia informs Jean is Bert and Reiner’s a cappella group. 

The stage is dark when he unexpectedly hears a voice start singing what he recognises as Technologic by Daft Punk. The voice is the accompanied by another voice and another, till three voices are doing an incredible harmony to words like _write it, cut it, paste it, save it_ and Jean is actually impressed. The lights fade on and the bass joins in – “That’s Bert!” Historia whispers to his left – and suddenly they’ve incorporated a different Daft Punk song and _wow, this is actually amazing._

From where they’re seated Jean can’t see too many details, but he sees Bertolt seated upon the stool on the end and next to him Reiner doing some _hella rad_ beat boxing. Next to Reiner – is that Eren Jaeger? At first Jean is grimacing, but then the boy begins to sing a verse from Get Lucky and, okay, Jean did not know he could sing. Even the guy who wouldn’t stop scowling next to Ymir has started to smile a little. He recognises the blonde on stage next to Eren as his friend Armin and then he frowns. Who was the fifth person? Leaning forward in his chair and squinting slightly, he begins to notice freckles. 

“Holy shit,” he says, mouth dropping open as Marco – _fucking Marco_ – looks directly at Jean as he begins to sing a verse from Digital Love. 

_Last night, I had this dream about you._

_In this dream, I’m dancing right beside you._

Jean leans back in his chair, eyes on Marco, disbelieving and also utterly _amazed_ because this boy can _sing_. He can tell Marco is laughing at him by the crinkled lines beside his eyes. He can also see how much Marco enjoys the performance; his shoulders are moving with the beat and his fingers tap against his skinny jeans, reminding Jean of the first time he saw him.

_There’s nothing wrong with just a little bit of fun._

_We were dancing all night long._

As Marco sings that line, he winks right at Jean, who completely blossoms with pink and has to bury his face in his hands because Sasha is laughing at him and Historia is making the kind of sounds you would make at a cute animal.

_I don’t know what to do, about this dream and you._

_I hope this dream comes true._

Jean peaks through his fingers as Marco continues to sing and his eyes still haven’t moved. He’s sincere in what he’s singing and Jean only has a brief chance to think _oh god, I’m being serenaded by Daft Punk and I like it_ before Sasha elbows him in the ribs and he blushes harder. 

The rest of the show goes wonderfully, or so says Historia. Jean was too busy trying not to have an aneurysm. 

\--

After the show the college provides drinks and snacks for those who stay behind. Jean congratulates Bertolt and Reiner on the slaying performance and even manages to mumble some sort of compliment to Eren, who actually shakes is hand and introduces the guy who wouldn’t stop scowling as his _boyfriend_. He finds himself standing in the corner of the room with a beer in his hand, when Marco spots him from across the room. He panics for the few seconds it takes Marco to walk across the room and through the people to get to Jean. 

“Hey,” Marco greets, hand snaking its way up to the nape of his neck, nervously. Jean reaches out to grab the arm displaying Marco’s nerves so he can entwine their fingers together. His heart beats hard and he doesn’t know why.

“You – uh, you were really great up there,” he tells Marco earnestly, squeezing his hand. Marco beams in return and Jean just _melts_. “Do you wanna –”

“Yeah,” Marco breathes in reply, before Jean even finishes the question. He leads them out of the building and Jean breathes a sigh of relief when they’re outside in the cold air. 

He’s pretty sure Sasha grabbed his butt and whispered _good luck_ , but he’s not sure.

\--

He doesn’t actually know what he was planning to do when they got to his place. He turns on the lights this time, so Marco can actually see the place. They were in too much of a hurry last time to think about such futile things.

Marco still hasn’t let go of his hand, doesn’t look like he will. When he notices the couch, he leads Jean over and pulls him down. Jean lands on Marco with a grunt, offers half an apology before Marco covers Jean’s lips with his own. 

There are fingers in his hair and – _oh_ – a tongue in his mouth and shivers that rise and fall over his skin and it’s really hot in his apartment, did he put the heater on? But then Marco slows down, kisses Jean softly, on his lips, on his nose, on the lids of his eyes. His fingers trace his jaw, travel down his throat. A happy sigh fills the silence between them, but Jean doesn’t know who made it. 

A while later, they shuffle around. Jean turns off the lights and Marco turns on the television and they return to the comfort of each other on the couch. 

Marco lays his head on Jean’s legs when they get comfortable. From his point of view, Jean can only make out Marco’s face vaguely. He is overcast with the light from the television, flickering its black and white contrasts over the contours of his face, falling in at the slope of his eyelids and the dip between his lips and his chin. His blinks are extended by a sleepiness washing over him in thick, slow waves. He never stops looking at Jean through his dark lashes. 

Jean is trying to ignore the beckoning fingers of sleep when he feels Marco shift in his lap. He tilts his head as Marco’s hand reaches up to trace his face. The touch is soft and Marco’s fingers are cool and soon enough, Jean finds his eyes getting heavy. 

“Do you smile, Jean?” Marco asks him, voice gentle, no louder than an easy summer breeze, “Do you laugh? Do you sing?”

Jean pauses before he responds, weary eyes opening just to look at Marco in the dim light of his home. 

“I’ve never had a reason to,” he responds. Marco smiles at him, tired and gentle, more crinkles by his eyes than the turn of his lips. Jean manages a small smile in return. 

“I guess, I’ve got you now.” 

**fin**

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone interested, Marco was singing [this](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOZG8zUqIPM) mash up of Kesha and The Beatles. 
> 
> Also [this](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MteSlpxCpo) was the song that the acapella group performed. Bert was the bass, Reiner did the beatboxing, Eren sang the part of the bro with blonde hair and Marco sang the part of the girl. That's how it went down in my head anyways.


End file.
